Editing Middle English (section)

===Early Middle English===
Early Middle English (1150–1350)<ref>{{cite book |last1=Fuster-Márquez |first1=Miguel |last2=Calvo García de Leonardo |first2=Juan José |year=2011 |title=A Practical Introduction to the History of English |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QQLBqKjxuvAC |location=[València] |publisher=Universitat de València |page=21 |isbn=9788437083216 |access-date=19 December 2017 }}</ref> has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with [[Scandinavian influence in English|many Norse borrowings]] in the northern parts of the country) but a greatly simplified [[inflection]]al system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the [[dative]] and [[instrumental case]]s were replaced in Early Middle English with [[preposition]]al constructions. The Old English [[genitive]] -{{lang|ang|es}} survives in the ''-'s'' of the modern [[English possessive]], but most of the other case endings disappeared in the Early Middle English period, including most of the [[Old English declension#Articles|roughly one dozen forms]] of the [[definite article]] ("the"). The [[Dual (grammatical number)|dual]] personal pronouns (denoting exactly two) also disappeared from English during this period.

The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed [[word order]] that also occurred in other Germanic languages (though more slowly and to a lesser extent), and, therefore, it cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population: English did, after all, remain the [[vernacular]]. It is also argued<ref>McWhorter, ''Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue,'' 2008, pp. 89–136.</ref> that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that, although Norse and English speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other due to similar morphology, the Norse speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings.

Important texts for the reconstruction of the evolution of Middle English out of Old English are the ''[[Peterborough Chronicle]]'', which continued to be compiled up to 1154; the ''[[Ormulum]]'', a biblical commentary probably composed in [[Lincolnshire]] in the second half of the 12th century, incorporating a unique phonetic spelling system; and the {{lang|enm|[[Ancrene Wisse]]}} and the [[Katherine Group]], religious texts written for [[anchoress]]es, apparently in the [[West Midlands (region)|West Midlands]] in the early 13th century.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Burchfield |first=Robert W. |chapter=Ormulum |editor-first=Joseph R. |editor-last=Strayer |title=Dictionary of the Middle Ages |location=New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons |year=1987 |volume=9 |page=280 |isbn=978-0-684-18275-9 }}, p. 280</ref> The language found in the last two works is sometimes called the [[AB language]]: one of a range of  regional dialects: East Midlands (London), South West (Kentish), Western (AB) and Northern.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Murchison |first1=Krista |title=Theme: Middle English Dialects |url=https://openmedieval.leidenuniv.nl/pages/dialects.html |website=Tomes |access-date=21 February 2025}}</ref>

Additional literary sources of the 12th and 13th centuries include ''[[Layamon's Brut]]'' and ''[[The Owl and the Nightingale]]''.

Some scholars<ref>{{cite web|url=http://hcmc.uvic.ca/makingEME/about.html|title=Making Early Middle English: About the Conference|website=hcmc.uvic.ca}}</ref> have defined "Early Middle English" as encompassing English texts up to 1350. This longer time frame would extend the corpus to include many Middle English Romances (especially those of the ''[[Auchinleck manuscript]]'' {{circa|1330}}).